as promised: customer repairs (186BB big repair job)

[bloke]

This thing's on its way home, today.

They had purchased a 188 Jakob Winter case from a retired professional tuba player. I didn't finish the job of making the interior long enough to accommodate their 186, but - having experience, I did pull the big bottom bow styrofoam crescent moon piece out and discard it for them, and what's left is an upholstered 1 inch thick foam rubber pad which allowed the 186 to fit in the Jakob Winter frame perfectly.
They claim that their spouse is a hot glue artist, so - when they get home - they're going to stick everything down exactly as it needs to be and to cosmetically appear...
... so it is traveling home in that hard case, rather than in the emergency bag that was also brought along.

They also brought their St Petersburg for me to do some work. I took out some easy to remove dents (most any dents are easy to remove from St Petersburg tubas, truth be told), but the main thing that they were complaining about was rotor buzzing noises.

Of course, oiling the bearings would have stopped it, but there was also some loud clicking. Driving all the bearings home still allowed for a bit of vertical play, and there wasn't time to put the bearings on a lathe and precision fit them, but with mineral oil on the bearings and all of them driven home, they began to get a bit quieter, but actually the other thing that quieted things down a lot was replacing completely worn out soft clear silicone bumpers with new medium firm black rubber bumpers, because - even though to the eye, the stop arms weren't hitting the cork plates - the stop arms were actually compressing the old worn out silicone completely which was resulting in de facto metal to metal contact, even though there was silicone in between.

Also - even though the links appeared to be European made, they were old enough to have some slop in them and we're clicking a little bit as well... Nothing to be done there except spend money.

The St Petersburg valve action is now "acceptably quiet", but not as quite as the 55-yesr-old Miraphone oem S-arm linkage 186 valve action.

[Stryk]

Hopefully I will get to see it up close and personal on the 19th. You did a beautiful job on it, Joe!

[bloke]

Hopefully I will get to see it up close and personal on the 19th. You did a beautiful job on it, Joe!

It doesn't quite look as good as it does in pictures, but it looks good. It plays good.

[MWoj]

FWIW, I saw this horn Friday afternoon, and the work was absolutely first-rate! The horn looked great and the S-style linkages were 'tight' with no 'slop' and they were completely silent. I really didn't think that was possible, but now I know better. I'm hoping to have one of my old, East German -made horns restored as this one was.

-MWoj.
Birmingham, AL

[prodigal]

You deserve an award for this "repair!"

[Stryk]

You deserve an award for this "repair!"